Global load balancer

DecisionRules is well accessible and stable thanks to the so-called Global Load Balancer. In this article, you can find out a little more about how it works.

Web traffic management and application delivery through several data centers and/or public or private clouds in diverse geographical locations are referred to as global server load balancing (GSLB). Client requests are normally forwarded to closer servers to guarantee minimal latency and maximum speed, and application load is typically controlled by “local” load balancers at each site.

How does it work?

Let’s take a look at what happens when a client sends an HTTPS request to a website that employs global server load balancing. Initially, the main server obtains the client’s IP address and analyzes data about the client’s location. Simultaneously, the server performs health checks to evaluate the servers’ real-time performance and responsiveness. Finally, the main server passes the request to the nearest geographically or with the quickest response time local DNS server. All of this happens behind the scenes in a matter of seconds. The main idea can be seen in the picture below.

Photo by Donna Toomey on EdgeNexus

Benefits

The main goal of the implementation of global server load balancing (GSLB) is to pursue the main benefits such as performance, maintainability, and disaster recovery.

Performance—by routing user queries to the nearest servers, network latency and problems are reduced. GSLB guarantees that clients in geographically dispersed places receive optimal website or service performance.

Maintenance—data center migrations and upgrades may be carried out without causing any disruption to clients since client requests can simply be diverted to other servers.

Disaster recovery—the high availability of applications reduces the effect of data center or network failures. For example, if a power outage occurs in California, the load balancer will divert client requests to other servers located across many sites that are geographically separated.

Where are our data centers?

DecisionRules automatically scale performance within a single location and can rapidly reroute requests to the nearest site in the case of a failure.

DecisionRules Datacenters

We currently use 8 data centers locations all over the world, and their number will be slowly growing according to our clients needs.

To find out more, check our documentation.

Thank you for reading!

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